To heat, weld, oxy-cut and scarf in steelworks, ship yards, steel construction and machine building factories, burners are used which consist of a shaft tube and centrally inserted scarfing, heating or cutting nozzle. The burner head carrying the nozzle is supplied with heating gas, heating oxygen, possibly air and cutting oxygen by pipes going through an uncooled or cooled shaft tube. From there these gases flow into the screwed-in or clamped-in nozzle, to be brought into the proper mixture and exit velocity and to burn after the exit with the wanted heating efficiency or to exit as a well-formed cutting jet to separate work pieces of steel by burning with a suitable advance. This applies as well for heating and welding burners without a cutting oxygen jet, or with a softer and larger volume scarfing jet instead a cutting jet for scarfing burners to machine off steel surfaces with oxygen and gas.
When cutting thicker and warmer work pieces of steel, i.e. when separating billets, blooms and slabs in steel mills, especially for separation of hot continuously moving steel strands produces in continuous casting, requirements come up, which can only be answered with difficulties and incompletely by applying several or replacing commonly used burners in an operation interrupting manner.
Part of them is the occasionally added separation of test slices for quality control of the cast material. To improve the cutting efficiency, to avoid deformations or metallurgical changes sometimes additional heat is applied to the material to be cut by additional burners respectively nozzles.
During long lasting processes such as cutting or scarfing the cutting, scarfing and also the heating nozzles have to be replaced in rather short intervals because of wear and pollution by flying cutting slag and sparks.
In all three aforementioned cases, the main burner respectively main burners resp. their nozzles have to be replaced or exchanged, which is costly and difficult.